The mother of the teenage girl who was stabbed in the eye by an irate woman outside the Diego Martin North Secondary School on Thursday afternoon is determined to see her daughter's assailant jailed."I don't forgive her...I going to court on Monday," declared Camille Sharpe, mother of 17-year-old Mayleen, who is warded at Port-of-Spain General Hospital where doctors are battling to save her eye."My daughter is in pain and the doctors are not sure if they can keep her eye," Sharpe added.A 53-year-old woman is now in police custody in connection with the incident.Sharpe said the suspect, who had once been a close friend of the family, attacked her two daughters in fit of rage, ripping their clothing, pulling out their hair and striking one of them with a length of iron.
Investigators say they are awaiting a medical report on Mayleen to determine what charges will be laid.According to police reports, there was an altercation outside the school among Mayleen and some other girls. The mother of one of the girls reportedly stuck a pencil in the teen's eye. According to Sharpe, the suspect used visit her home daily."She used to watch the Young and Restless and eat our food...Even her daughter was best friends with Mayleen," she said.She said Mayleen went to the school on the the day of the incident because her younger sisters, Maxine, 15, and Josephine, 14, had recently been threatened by schoolmates."She went to the school to bring her sisters home," Sharpe explained.
According to Sharpe, the woman intervened in a dispute among teenagers outside the school."She tear down Maxine's school clothes and pull out a piece of her hair...Then after everything die down she turn around and pick up a piece of iron outside the school and hit her (Mayleen) in her head and stick the pencil in her eye," she said."I know she has things on her mind...but I won't do that to somebody else child."Sometimes if we see children fighting, we try and stop it."Sharpe said she stopped speaking to the woman ten years ago because she "wanted to beat me also."
Meanwhile, officials at the Ministry of Education said Sharpe's relatives were being offered counselling.They confirmed that Mayleen was not a student since she left school years ago and had been visiting her sister at the time of the incident.
